Louis Rossmann's opinion on Librem 5

Hardware Librem 5
42

It was more about Purism and the buying experience than it was about the phone itself. But, yes, it was negative.

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43

He is a guy who freely admits that “he could be clearly talking out of his ass” when dissing Purism.

Based on the depth of his information (i.e. lack thereof), I conclude that the answer to “why should I care?” is: you shouldn’t.

He is a guy who says that if a big-time politician sent a computer in for repair and, while repairing the device, he discovered politically-relevant emails, he would leak the emails. For the record, I get where he is coming from with that but that is grossly unprofessional and a gross breach of trust.

OK, sure, if you send a device in for repair, you should either wipe it or encrypt it (well, it should already be encrypted) - but if you are not sufficiently technical to know that, should your repairer take advantage of that?

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44

Once your device is sent out for repair, whatever happens to it during/after transit is out of your control, regardless of whether it should happen or not.

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45

Gardiner (linuxgamer or something like that I think) used to, not sure about recently. But it was always about technology, not policy or support.

This seems a little like the early days of Microsoft/Apple/Facebook etc. startups… messy, questionable decision making, controversies… of course they had the advantage of insanely larger markets to cater to.

I don’t know if this is what happened here, but when you’re unwilling to compromise on principles at all, sometimes all you end up with is “well at least we stuck to our principles” as you file for bankruptcy and lose a bunch of investor funds. And then worse people end up winning again.

Possibly the biggest mess up was doing this as a “pre-order” instead of a kickstarter/investment thing where the risk was transparently obvious to everyone. Maybe I’m less critical because I realized I was taking a risk from the start. But also when I think about this in contrast to the horrible crap big tech has forced on us, it pales in comparison.

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46

Gardiner Bryant ended up creating a video editing series for Purism later on:

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